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Merrill Lynch Rips Sun
cosjef writes "In an open letter to Sun, an analyst for Merrill Lynch tells Sun to change or risk adding itself to the junkyard of formerly-great technology companies like DEC or Data General. The letter even recommends taking the helm away from McNealy, whose 'brash and contrarian personality have been synonymous with the company's image and success. Unfortunately, the act is getting old.' Sun's mistakes are well documented, but the biggest one is believing that what made them successful in the past would make them successful in the future."
Unfortunately, many companies then made advertising and PR their primary products, slashing R&D because they thought they'd had their budget strategies wrong all along. Sun was king of this, apparently thinking a strong brand was what sold systems, not leading edge technology. Engineering went into the toilet, and now while Sun's still good at a few things, all but their most insanely-priced hardware is nothing better than what you get with off-the-shelf commodity components.
Today, people are researching to upgrade and evolve their server networks, not just grabbing the first implementation they think they understand. And that means it takes a lot more than McNealy's I-wanna-be-Steve-Jobs song and dance to sell product.
Newsforge
Would be to ape SCO in the hardware business. Claim that all hardware innovation after 1980 belongs to Sun. Doesn't matter if it's silly, as long as they can take Intel to court and threaten AMD :^).
If all else fails, they could get Windows to run on their servers, can't they?
-
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Sun will be fine. After the exit of the two companies mentioned in the story, they are the 64 bit and high end market provider now.
//Netmar uses sun machines. www.netmar.com
Seriously. If you want to spend $5000, $8000, or even $75,000 on a computer, you can go to Dell. But, if you're looking to drop $1.3 million on a computer, you go to Sun.
For anyone that has used sun hardware, we know. It really can't be beat. The stuff is fast, scalable, and bulletproof. Sun OS is about as stable as they come.
~Will
sig?
Steven Milunovich, an analyst for Merrill Lynch, was dismissed from his post today. The official line from ML is that the "values and opinions of the report are not in line" with the company's.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
The Inquirer also has an article predicting the doom Sun. It references an article by Eric S. Raymond at Newsforge found here.
Please please please leave Sun alone - after all, _they_ are running the business, therefore it's their responsability, no matter if success or failure happens.
The concerted "efforts" to "rescue" Sun, to bring it to the path of righteousness look very dubious to say the least: on one hand everybody and his sister seem to enjoy firing on this particular ambulance, on the other hand nobody seems to want to miss the feeding frenzy over some presumable defunct company. The last example was given by ESR: http://newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=03/10/02/12402 43.
Give the poor people a break!
Bill Joy. Not Bruce Perens.
I've worked for Sun in the late 70s and again in the mid-80s as a contractor
Good trick, that, to work for a company in the 70's that was founded in 1982. (with only 4 employees too) Sun Getting Started
Wheeeee.........Ah, I see that was an AC.
Bruce Perens, eh? I heard he was dead at 54? Truly an American Icon.
I've been an avid investor and it is my experience that the financial firms such as MerrylLynch, PriceWaterhouseCoopers and others have their own biased stance. They are either flogging a company so that a competitor will rise in value or just are simply wrong. Furthermore, I think you're describing Merryl Lynch's business model here. Marketing is how financial industry make money, hell they can sell you paper for your dollars, they gotta be doing a great job of marketing. Who's Wall Street to talk about substance? The whole financial industry is operating on hot air. Oh wait, hot air actually has some value.
Being a finance firm and all, anything said about a big company like Sun by MerrylLynch can and should be suspect. They'll deride or support a company based soley on what's good for their portfolio.
Maybe they've sold a lot of Sun stock short, or maybe they think Sun's doing fine but want some cheap stock. They do this sort of thing all the time.
I've worked for Sun in the late 70s and again in the mid-80s as a contractor.
Interesting... Since they didn't exist until 1983.
Even though Sun may have lost their chief scientist, Bruce Perens
You mean Bill Joy?
He was obviously refering to its previous incarnation.
I mean... let' run through some arguments here:
1) if they are so good at analyzing the market and which company will do good / do bad, why arn't they sitting around with billions, but instead slaves away at financial institutions?
2) how many analysts spoke out at the beginning of the dot com bubble insightfully? (i.e. "this won't last?") IIRC everyone, yes including the analysts, were basically like "hey everybody what a wonderful opportunity! buy buy buy!"
3) AFAIK analyst predictions on stock / company performance has never been any more accurate than random guesses or predictions from a layman (within error tolerance) - I believe the reference was fool.com;
so, can anybody GIVE me a reason why market analysts should be trusted for their opinions? Besides that they went through a couple years of economy schoool (which, according to my acquaintance studying economy, is mostly like astrology)?
My life in the land of the rising sun.
This post is factually wrong on several accounts (Sun's creation, Bill Joy). Please mod it down.
Speak truth to power.
Even though Sun may have lost their chief scientist, Bruce Perens, recently, they are still a force to reckoned with.
Damn, and your comment was almost making sense.
There goes yer credibility.
Long live Linux!
Spinning Java away from the parent company would seem like an excellent idea. Why tie the success or failure of two largely seperate systems together?
I don't see java dying... but maybe I'm just too surrounded by it...
Davak
Sheesh, the moderators rated this troll informative?
Sun is in dire straits, based on their latest PR campaign ("The Sun Java System") they have abandoned any semblance of technology in their technology. In a nutshell, "The Sun Java System is a radical new approach for synchronizing IT investments with business priorities by decreasing IT costs." How does this have anything to do with IT? What kind of _product_ is this?
Meanwhile, they seem to be able to demonstrate a positive cashflow even with a tough economic climate. This is a good thing, but they continue to have "one-time" expense every other quarter.
Merrill is wrong when it comes to R&D, this is clearly the only thing that can save Sun now. You don't win in the technology game by promising things like the Sun Java System; you win by demonstrating technology that cannot be obtained elsewhere.
Eric Sarjeant
eric[@]sarjeant.com
The only product of Sun's I know about and they didn't mention it once. If microsoft alledgedly make all their money from MS Office, couldn't Star Office be a huge revenue stream for Sun if it competes favorably for price?
I've worked for Sun in the late 70s and again in the mid-80s
You do realize that was nearly two decades ago? That's like a century in computer years.
Mad Hatter
"If a posting comes from an AC, and if the posting seems interesting, BUT YOU, as a moderator, don't know anything about the subject, then don't moderate up an AC. Just ignore them if you aren't sure."
the sun also sets? you can bet your .asp that those phonIE ?pr? ?firm? analcysts from the pacific crest annex of wall street of deceit are completely buyassed buy now.
scott et AL, is no more phonIE than fuddles, merrill, & the (monIE) hole georgewellian fuddite corepirate nazi payper liesense stock markup execrable. scott just doesn't suck up as well. robbIE, it would seem, fears the sun. 'course they're not paying him big bucks (funnIE monIE) to tout the kingdumb's whoreabully infactdead softwar gangster hostage scam BugWear(tm).
don't even bother robbIE, we'll tell 'em.
Don't start about personality!
-------
Warning: Slashdot may contain traces of nuts.
Who are these moderators? This one is WAY too obvious...
Sun was founded in 1982... see Sun's website
Bruce Perens worked for HP... see article here
The Checkpoint firewall is not a Sun product... see Checkpoint Software Technologies
Both SGI and Sun were killed (past tense) by commodity hardware that was "good enough" to take away their sales even before they stopped innovating. In SGI's case, they panicked believing Itanium would come out in 1997 and kill them. They tried to switch to commodity hardware but couldn't stomach it and the dithering ate away at them. Itanium still sucks to this day (but MIPS could never break 1Ghz...).
.com boom of 2000. Now they're getting killed by Dells at the low end and grids at the high end. They have a huge number of employees because the company is feeding off historical service contracts (the same thing that's keeping SGI on life support). Sun needs to shrink, simplify, and focus or they'll be dead in 10 years also.
Sun fell down on the workstation side a long time ago, but their servers were hot thru the
...that most Merill Lynch analysts were yelling "buy! buy!" in 2000.
That said, I think Sun is already dead. Two billion in cash is all that is keeping the corpse from rotting.
Sun becoming a big player in the linux world, after all, solaris is one of the most stable version of unix out there. It wouldnt surprise me in the least if we see a headline in 5 years stating that SUN microsystems has merged with a large linux company (redhat perhaps?)
This sig was generated by a barrel of trained kittens for SeXy_Red (550409).
tr = new Translation(from = Marketspeak, to = English)
tr < OpenLetterToSun
I have shorted the shit out of Sun stock, and now I want it to go down like a Clinton Intern. I will now rip you a new one in an "open" letter targeted not at Sun but rather at the sheeple who day trade.
Once your stock price bombs out, I will make a killing, then buy in at the lower price. After that, expect another "open" letter praising Sun to the heavens, in order to pump the stock back up.
God, I love being a market manipulator^Wanalyst.
<EOF>
delete tr;
www.eFax.com are spammers
Release Java to the community please! Nobody can afford the J2EE licensing costs!
.. it'll reduce they can be bought at.
Do it before you get bought out.
They'll never do it, after all
I would hope PriceWaterhouseCoopers, as the largest public accounting firm auditing many SEC registrants, wouldn't have their own biased stance. How did this rubish get above the radar?
WARNING: WE HAVE NOT CONDUCTED A FELONY-CONVICTION SEARCH OR FBI SEARCH ON THIS INDIVIDUAL.
It is also dangerous & not compleatly fair. By 'making' these predictions, they are helping them to come through. The dot-bomb saga transpired *because* of analysts making high-in-the sky predictions of what companies were going to be able to sell. Every time you say "Sun is dead", you help discourage people from taking out support contracts with Sun, thereby helping worsen Sun's position, to the benefit of Microsoft.
scams.
/. anymore, is knowing how much payper liesense ?pr? ?firm? FUDge is packed into everIE storIE. yuk.
va lairIE/robbIE//. pretends to ignore the stock markup, UNLESS there's something to 'report' that fuels the SourceForgerIE's prospects?
fauxking phonIE ?pr? ?firm? scriptdead storIEs. reminds US of the refudlicking partIE. the ONLYstuff that matters about
last gaspers they are. lookout bullow.
consult with/trust in yOUR creator. get ready to see the light.
Anway, Solaris and Unix in general is dying thanks to Linux and Windows2k.
THe perception I think is accurate in many ways. Sun should of got into newer markets. Sun just happens to be failing the least while HP and IBM make money from other products to make up the losses.
Your right about innovative people but that does not matter. Sun ignores all of R&D with no commitment on products or they can not come up with cost effective solutions. Java came to be because their interactive TV boxes were too expensive and non practical.
They wanted the network computer in the nineties and should of developed a cheap Tivo/webTV like system that would be cost effective.
Instead conservative management likes to only focus on what they are known for which is expensive mainframes and servers. Now that market is shrinking and they only have Java left which now is under competition from
If the competitors solutions are free then the value of your product goes down with it. This is why Bill Gates loved throwing IE everywhere when Netscape was a company. The trick was to make netscape's value less then cost to produce! After that then they would go under. MS was right.
http://saveie6.com/
I think the comment subject says it all.
Let's not forget Merrill Lynch had Enron as a buy even after employees were seen leaving the building in the 100's with boxes in their hands.
As a former quantative analyst, I can say this about the larger brokerage houses. They have an agenda. If they can generate enough hype (up or down) about a company, true or not, they wind up right, because the uneducated/ignorant masses follow their "leads" like lemmings. It's a simple business from ML's perspective. If you build it (the hype) the will come.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
Disclaimer: I am not a Sun employee and own no stocks but I do contracting work for them and like the company.
;) Sparc will probably marginalize in the long run (not in the next two three years though).
Saying that Sun is focused on marketing more than technology is rediculous to anyone who knows the company from inside. Sun makes computers in the high end that few can compete with. Up to 4 CPU's go with Intel+Linux but when we go over to 8 or 16 cpu's then both cost and performance are on Sun's side.
However Linux+Intel/AMD/PPC(IBM) are getting much better and cheaper and at a point I guess Sun won't be able to compete on the hardware side, and like SGI before it will have to make a switch and let go of the large margines etc...
I feel that Sun can survive that switch, its one of the best managed companies I worked with, thats a true live demonstration of how their own technology can be used to make the employees life easier.
A simplified view would look at Sun's declining server sales and say thats it... However Sun is huge and makes zillions of other things:
1. CPU's and special hardware - Sun ray is actually selling well and limited only by the lack of marketing drive to sell it. It works with Linux also so it allows cheaper deployment.
2. Sun owns Cobalt that make great Linux boxes.
3. Sun has a huge software stack including Solaris (that has quite a few features still missing from Windows/Linux) and star office. This allows Sun to offer an almost full hardware+software stack (including the application server) with the only thing missing being a database server. Only few companies can seriously compete in this level.
4. Sun has several divisions that do outsourcing work for many global companies including cellular operators etc...
Sun has many revenue streams many of which won't dry up even if the whole world left Sparc+Solaris and moved to Linux+Intel.
The reasons for Suns decline are:
1. Moving to Linux+Intel - yes it has a serious effect on the company and changes need to be made.
2. Dot com failure - Suns biggest clients were the dot coms and when they bombed Sun is trying to move into traditional industries. This takes time.
The Sun will rise again although I doubt the Sparc will be there
I have no doubt that these guys can pull it off though.
Mainly in that their recently announce hardware and software solutions don't exist in the physical form.
So they are selling what? A roadmap to the future? Software and hardware vaporware?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Bloke who has only ever worked at a bank, says that a company who have driven technology innovation for 20 years is buggered because the world has changed....
Oi Sherlock... who changed it ? I'm sorry but these analysts get on my nerves sometimes. These are the sorts of people bumping SCO, while dumping Sun who only have a couple of billion in the bank, are cash positive each quarter and have FINALLY realised software is important.
Sun are rubbish at marketing themselves, but most of what this analyst says is either "yeah yeah" or just plain bunk.
Has the analysts _run_ a company ? _Worked_ in IT ?
Fire McNeally... are you the chap who recommended Apple should fire Jobs all those years ago ?
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
This guy has a reputation for doing this sort of thing, and more people need to know about it.
now wouldn't that be a good MS killer uber merger?
- sun for their server kit
- novell for their networking
- apple for desktops
- os would be jointly developed using the fantastic ximian guys, the OSX team and the JAVA boys.
From the article:
" "We have an open invite for Steve to come to talk with us" about the company's focus, Hakkert added."
My remark: bring in the other Steves!
My alma matta was one of the largest Dec Sites in the country in the early 80's. All the universities infrastructure systems DEC systems and their was a mandate that all incoming students by DEC PC-350's. The net effect was there was no way to avoid the product line.
Funny thing was while some of the equipment (VAX-xxxx, PDP-11 series) were excellent, most of it was an incredible pain. The PC-350 were based on the PDP-11 architecture but wouldn't run any of the common PDP-11 operating systems. Whats more the 350's couldn't even format their own floppies. The mainframes (DEC-10,DEC-20) while solid systems suffered from unique features, 36 bit word size was my favorite.
Anyway, at one point Ken Olsen, the then CEO of DEC came to give a speach/pep talk about the great advances we were making and how wonderfull DEC would be in the future. In his q/a session he had 3000 angry engineers asking him how his company could foist off pieces of crap like the 350. His response was that we lacked an understanding of how his business worked.
DEC is but one. Technology companies must understand that they are about serving customer needs, not their own arrogance. I can go down the list of for days citing companies that either felt they were successfull so nothing could happen, or they were unique and nothing would happen, or they were just plain arrogant.
Scott Mcnealy has always been on the plain arrogant side. Suns products have always been priced very high, and they have never been willing to make the effort to penetrate mass markets. The funny thing is I really love their equipment, the same way I really love apples. The problem is I can't bring myself to buy it or recommend it in most circumstances.
Dell spends more than Apple on R&D. What's wrong with you?
One mistake was adopting GNOME. They now pay for it.
And it's good to look at the fact that it only reflects the beliefs of people who are geed-aware enough to trade shares. Most of these people are usually uninformed enough about reality as to trust the firm-provided analysts when they say things like that SCO's IP-blackmail business plan will be a complete boom.
See SCO's trades rising? That has nothing to do with reality, as anyone who recognize the nonsense in the phrase "I own UNIX" can tell.
Several financial firms seem to have already spoken about the "critical" and "wrong" situation of Sun Microsystems and exactly which percentage of layoffs they shall apply. Maybe they're right, but, as usual with analysts and their habit to work on none or little real information, I'd say they guess, as they do most of the time.
That is, if they're not actually trying to trigger some share-price-waves for their own benefit.
Personality leaks in the company may be a better indicator to use, and the fact that their upper layers are trying to ignore the Free Software/Open Source phenomenon (just like Microsoft did before; they no longer do; they now have a "Linux Chief" for a "Linux Strategy" consisting on destroying Linux) shows they have the same short sight that Microsoft did. However Microsoft has a lot of money from their dominant business, that buys them some time to try to react, whereas Sun may have not so much time left.
Will they want to see the lion running on them for a meal? I hope they'll do. But pretending to see the future would be behaving like all those financial analysts.
But if they go down in the end, I only hope Java gets open-sourced, rather than it getting bought by Microsoft in order to shut down the technology.
The "analyst" here hasn't even talked to Sun execs for some time, is always negative on Sun, wants Sun to drop all their products that compete with Microsoft (pretty much) and force all their existing customers through a complete product and architecture change (by dumping SPARC), which would have them up in arms.
see here for some detail of "the loon" as The Register call him.
I used to read Steve Milunovich's research fairly regularly.
One of the advantages of reading Steve was that he did his own surveys of Fortune 100 (500?) CIOs, asking about budgets (ie future system vendor revenues) and various topics of the day (ERP deployments, etc). So I found his comments that Sun should make contrarian bets but "do so in ways palatable to conservative CIOs" interesting. Steve may have some unique insight into that.
What's a little odd to me about Steve's advice is the contradictions in it. At least based on the admittedly summary article linked here. On the one hand, he seems to advocate a "batten-down-the-hatches"-type strategy: cut R&D, dump SPARC (eventually), don't make waves, be more Linux friendly. And on the other hand he seems to say "make contrarian bets". It may be that Sun is just doomed due to volume economics (although in fairness, they have always been *way* more focused on that than every other Unix vendor in my past discussions with management I met in my past life), but the "batten-down-the-hatches" strategy seems more likely, not less likely to lead them down the "DEC, Data General, Compaq" path. Sure Sun needs to be shrewd and somewhat conservative in cutting excess spending. Maybe that *is* what they need to do to stabilize their stock a bit. But that isn't how they're going to avoid the 'computing graveyard'.
Although if you are doomed to the computing graveyard (something I thought was true of Sun in 1995 but Sun did stunningly well the following five years), it is true that the most prudent thing to do is spend your remaining strength as conservatively as possible. I don't have any easy answers myself for Sun. I can't fault Milunovich for trying, but the advice doesn't look particularly helpful to me.
--LP
Sun is dying. You don't have to be a Merril Lynch Advisor to predict the future: Sun's future looks bleak. After having to take legal action against Microsoft in order to get their Java virtual machine into Windows, it becomes perfectly obvious that Sun's resources have dried up and its days are numbered. A survey of Linux users shows Solaris comes up dead last among the systems they use, right behind MSDOS, Slackware, and Microsoft Bob. Predictions of non-profitability and Sun's imminent demise flow like red ink that's been extracted from 10 million red ball point pens, collected into a big bucket, and then quickly poured out for effect.
Sun is the weakest link. Bye now.
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
Solaris is critical to why users like Sun. Being late to Linux is unforgivable both because Linux is a kissing cousin to Unix and because Linux is a disruptive threat to Microsoft.
Sun needs to convince users that Linux is a subset of Solaris and push two messages: (1) if you're doing Linux, go to the Unix expert, and (2) use Linux on the edge, but when you need mission-critical capability it's time to graduate to Solaris.
That's incredible. Since when should a technology company be worried about disrupting a competitor? Nuts. Sun should make all the money it can and if it does so by taking share from a competitor's inferior offerings, that's great. Merrill Lynch is attempting to halt technological progress in order to protect it's worthless Microsoft holdings. This is ass backward, they should be looking out for their investors by urging them to sell Microsoft.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The most widely used language in the IT world is dying? Strange definition of the word 'dying'
I should start making recommendations to major companies.
Maybe then I'd finally get people pretending with me.
- To benefit the analyst (bonuses etc.)
- To benefit the bank or banking clients (see point 1)
- Publicity
The good of the standard investor or the company being invested in doesn't even come into it. The fact he's made this an open letter means he needs Sun's stock to move for one reason or another.> A prominent technology analyst for Merrill Lynch is urging Sun Microsystems (Quote, Chart) to slash as much as 15 percent of its workforce
[...]
And I am urging SCO (Quote, Chart) to slash as much as 100 percent of its workforce.
BoD
Do you care about the future of Java? Are you interested in seeing Java continue to be the premier platform for computing in the next several decades?
Then please take the time to sign this new Spin Java petition, which asks Sun Microsytems and Scott McNealy to spin off Java into a separate sister company.
Spin Java Petition
For more info click here. Thank you.
But my experience with Merrill Lynch and my brother's experience likewise is that they are without integrity. Therefore, you cannot trust anything they say.
Just as an example, you read their advice to "convince Linux users that Linux is a subset of Solaris..."
Bud, that ain't going to happen. SCO is too busy with the exact same thing. And yes, it's great for their stock price, especially since a Microsoft-club investor is buying up as much stock as they can.
But SCO isn't healthy.
Of course, their other advice, to slash the workforce, is also in the same line: it is detrimental to the health of Sun. Let me explain what happens when you slash the work force.
First of all, all those employees who thought that they had reasonable job security, get depressed. Depression means more time wasted. It means decreased efficiency. That means more cuts, down the road. Eventually, it means you outsource everything, and end up as a shell (though maybe an IP shell like SCO, which generates lots of volatility, which might be good for Merrill Lynch).
Second of all, when you cut the workforce, employees get paranoid. That means that they start to decide that they don't have the authority to stick up (the nail that sticks up, getting hammered and all). So they don't try to innovate. In fact, they squelch innovation. They try to make it look like they're doing as good a job as anyone else, and aside from that avoid notice.
Worse than that, it sickens the company in another way: ...
Suppose you have n employees. The internal threats to a company are a function of the number of employees. A failure can happen with any one of the n employees. Or it can happen with any group of 2 employees. Or with 3 employees. All together, the probability of a failure occurring is
n + n*(n-1)/2 + n*(n-1)*(n-2)/6 +
Now, at the same time, employees don't like to see their company fail, so they do try to fix things. But their ability to fix things is a function of their authority. If their authority is not enough to fix it, then the fix won't happen, and the company takes a loss of some amount. So the same equation as above applies to the number of employees with authority: ...
a+a*(a-1)/2+a*(a-1)*(a-2)/6 +
Of course, a is less than n. So the health of a company is greater if a=n, or is as large as possible. But when you're making cuts, even employees who are nominally with authority act like they have no authority. So every single little cold, every single angry statement, every single office affair hurts the company and results in real damages.
So Sun, Don't Listen to Merrill Lynch. Unless you first exchange all your stock for all of theirs in a 100%-100% stock swap. It might not be a bad idea, at that. From the open letter, I'm sure Merrill's market analysts know how to build hardware and write software. And at that, I'd trust you guys with my assets a lot sooner than I'd trust them.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
I wanted to become proficient in UNIX style O/S during my college years. Solaris is well known and could be downloaded for educational purposes, so I decided to give it a shot. Being a poor college student, I decided to download the Solaris for Intel (I'm not sure if it was version 7 or 8, it was a several years ago) since I didn't have resources to buy a Sun machine. I tried to install it on a typical Intel machine of that time (Pentium II running on a 440BX based board) and I could not get the installer to recognize the IDE controllers! My friend tried to install it on his machine (also a 440BX based board), with the same results. Only controller that he was able to install off of was an Adaptec SCSI card. I searched the Sun's help forum on the Intel platforms for solutions, and turns out that I wasn't the only one with the IDE controller issue. I couldn't find the solution I was looking for but I did find plenty of comments like "Sun's support for Intel platform sucks" and "Sun has no reason to support Intel platform because it will cut into their server sales". I decided to give up on Solaris for Intel and looked for alternatives...
And that alternative was GNU/Linux. I started with Red Hat 6.1 and it installed on my Intel box without a hitch. And the rest was history.
If Sun had better support for the Intel platform, then I would be replacing the Windows servers at my company right now with Solaris for Intel instead of GNU/Linux. Sun lost me as a customer when I was an impressionable college student, and I'm pretty sure that Sun also lost a huge amount of potential customers in that mostly useless help forum.
The latest version of Solaris is supposed to have better support for Intel platform but why should I pay $20 to download a limited use, non-commercial license version of Solaris that may/may not work with the current hardware owned by the company when GNU/Linux simply works and does everything that we need without the restrictive license?
When Sun realized that when they bombed on the Intel platform market, they tried to enter as a latecomer by pretending to support Linux, even after calling it a hobbyist's O/S a year ago. And when they improved the support for Intel platform on their latest version of Solaris, they backstabbed Linux by bashing it again and also by fanning SCO's FUD bonfire. Knowing that, if my company ever needs to buy a high end server in the future, I'd rather will go with an IBM box than Sun, even if I have to pay a little extra.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
Disclosure: I worked for SGI in the latter half of the 90s.
We competed with Sun. We found that the Sun machines could not hold a candle to the SGI (or IBM hardware, and occasionally the HP hardware when they got their heads out of their asses every few years). It was well known by our customers, and often repeated to us as a reason to bring us in, that Sun gear was simply not fast. It was quite hard to justify spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on gear when VPs desktops often were able to run some of the benchmark tests in similar time to the Sun gear.
Sun machines are not fast. They are quite slow. Solaris is not a paragon of stability. One of our customers pointed out their charts of availability to us. One of the most available machines was a PowerChallenge box I had set up in their computing center. Had been up and functioning under heavy load for something approaching 2 years, without an unplanned shutdown. One of the least available machines was the Cray SuperDragon^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Sun Starfire machine which was not able to stay up long enough to complete the benchmark acceptance suite. Many of our other customers noted this as well.
SGI is now a small fraction of its former self. It abandoned the Beast and Alien (2 amazing CPUs, due in 1999 and 2001 respectively), courtesy of Forest Basket and his inept reasoning, and went whole hog for Itanic. Some of us warned the company that this would be the undoing of the company. We were ignored. We were also right. Management had assured us that Itanic would take off, and be the next big thing. Yeah. Right. It appears now that the next big thing is Opteron. Too bad they bet the company on Itanic.
Sun has some similar choices ahead, though its technology is not really all that good. Some things are of interest, like the "java" desktop, which sounds like an S/ID card with a server and remote thin clients. Neat, but requires some serious networking infrastructure. Also, java aspect is irrelevant.
Java itself as a technology is a solution in search of a problem. Yeah, it is everywhere. Should it be? Is it really the correct solution to most of the problems? No, not by a long shot. The more I see it deployed, the larger the sale of a bridge I see... It is a language seeking to become an operating environment/system, targetting windows and everything else. It is supposed to be write once run anywhere, but the reality is "write 3 or 4 times and debug everywhere, and then grouse about how slow it is, while rabidly defending the decision, which you are questioning yourself, to use it for such a mission critical application".
Sun has some rather serious challenges ahead. Its hardware simply sucks rocks. Its software ain't all that good. Java is the jack of all trades, master of none.
Time for re-invention. Split out the SPARC, replace it with Opteron. Ditch lots of the software. Spin out Java. Give it a fighting chance to morph into something useful and find a real direction on its own. Sell off or close down the rest.
With McNealy at the helm, this will never happen.
1) The numbers don't lie. Sunw's numbers are awful and getting worse. These numbers cut out of the yahoo profile:
Earnings Per Share (ttm): -0.75
Profitability
Profit Margin (ttm): -29.99%
Operating Margin (ttm): -23.82%
Management Effectiveness
Return on Assets (ttm): -23.85%
Return on Equity (ttm): -42.61%
2) Consider the competition. NUMA, RCU, and JFS, for Linux just came out within the last year. Also within the last year: 64-bit processors from AMD, Intel, and Mototola. The competition is catching up fast, and not just on the low end.
Merril Lynch Rips Sun, Supernova to Begin Shortly
Merill Lynch were one of the first banks to be open about their adoption of Linux. Many banks had Linux boxes in the background, but Merill's a) admited it and b) started to move more of their server applications there. For them internall, it was a move away from Sun, who they regarded as having 'lost it'.
See my journal, I write things there
Sun was and is an expensive hardware company. They killed their own business by creating Java. Since Java can run anywhere, why would you need a big iron Sun box? You don't, you can run it on small intel/Linux boxes. Sun has created their own demise.
Furthermore, McNealy is incapable of saying two sentences without mentioning Bill Gates. He's obsessed with Microsoft and just seems to forget about his own company.
Sun is definitely finished. The writing is on the wall. N1 and Java is not going to save them.
For anyone that has used sun hardware, we know. It really can't be beat. The stuff is fast, scalable, and bulletproof. Sun OS is about as stable as they come.
Oh come on, you've obviously not used anything else. We had to compare 2 servers - one from Sun, one from IBM. The IBM one was not only cheaper, more powerful, just as easy to manage (one of the CPUs was DOA, the engineer came round, whipped the unit out, slapped a new one in, said 'there you go' and was off), but also could close its door properly, and was a much nicer black colour. Oh, and we didn't have to fork out extra for a monitor - it came with a nice flat panel, which was good for 2 years ago.
Apparently HP servers today are just as good.
So, why would you rave on about Sun? Their competitors are better. If you want to spend millions of dollars on a really fancy server, buy an AS/400 (sorry, zSeries or whatever they've called it now). That *really* is bulletproof. Want to spend more?? Buy a mainframe off IBM and run 100s of linux installations off it!. (or even just a high-end unix/linux server . They don't give prices on the web, but if you have to ask how much it is.....
Anyone that thinks Sun still competes, just hasn't checked out the opposition.
Sun seems to be displaying the same behavior as a small retail shop being outed by a new supercenter. Instead of trying to innovate, Sun is holding on to its existing business model for dear life. The only difference in this scenario, is that the supercenter is Linux on commodity hardware.
The declining of Sun and Scott McNeely's progressing megalomania. The man clearly doesn't want to see his company lose prominence but his own actions are causing it to do so. He needs to give up on the "the network is the computer" concept and just accept that people like having their own personal PC's. He should also stop obsessing about Microsoft, because Microsoft sure as hell isn't obsessing about Sun. MS is worried about Linux, and Scott should be too.
But he can't see that you see, for Scott only has eyes for Microsoft.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
HP just released some press saying they will pay sun customers 25,000$ to switch to Linux on HP. Damn that sure sounded like the last nail being pounded into the coffin.
Got Code?
Let me give you one crystal clear example of how Sun is its own worst enemy...
J2EE certification....
JBoss which is one of the only Open Source J2EE providers still cannot call themselves a J2EE provider. (Maybe recently solved).
Why is this?
Well, it lies because Sun made it that to become a J2EE member you have to oodles of money, and then you have pay more oodles of money to part of the official "J2EE" club.
Sun has this elitist attitude that says, "Oh, this will cost you because it is meant to be good". And NO WAY THAT WE WILL HAVE OPEN SOURCE cheapen the J2EE products. It reminds me of a Ferrari dealer telling me a Ferrari is better than any other vehicle...
Well, lad-di-da, I just want a car to go from point a to b, maybe carry the kids, dogs, and wife. Sure these "simple" cars are not as glamerous, but at least there is a business.
Now before somebody correct me on how well Ferrari is doing, let me remind them that their parent (Fiat) is dying and Ferrari is only doing better because they bought Maserrati. Maserrati sells for a fraction of a Ferrari, about the same as a high end BMW. Which again proves the point, that businesses grow when things are affordable... This is something that Sun just does not want to learn!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
...for the count? A lot of speculation at the time they'd be bought out by Sun.
Problem is, it's hard to see how Sun could do what Apple did -- consolidate and re-occupy a niche.
Where to begin?
This guy tells us what everybody already knows: Sun's not going well, the stock is plummeting, sales are low, market shares are shrinking, their position in the server market is unsustainable... Thank you buddy!! Do you realize all of this already hit the mainstream media? It's not news for anyone who just follows the tech industry casually. Add some obvious generalities : "Sun's mistakes are well documented, but the biggest one is believing that what made them successful in the past would make them successful in the future." All in all, we have a random guy trying to make us believe that he's smart.
So long for the diagnosis. And what cure does he suggest? Cut and focus, fire the CEO, be acquired... blah, blah, blah... Standard cut&paste from recommandations to ANY firm that's not doing well.
This "open letter" would have been useful 2 or 3 years ago. It would have been interesting if Merril had a clue about what's really going on at Sun and which options they have left.
Analysis involves more than reading the press, going through the accounts and talking to the CEO twice per year. If you want to have any informed opinion on a large company (especially in the tech sector), you need to talk to R&D, talk to the product marketing guys, appraise the quality of the people, have a clue to where the industry is going, evaluate customers' and employees' loyalty...
That's a tough job. Far tougher than picking easy scapegoats (McNealy). If you're not prepared to do it, better find a real job.
It would be nice to be sure of anything the way some people are of everything.
Depend on the timeframe. I saw the inside of a SPARCStation-1 and a DECstation of the same time. They cost the same and could the same, but the DECStation was crammed with electric components and spaghetti connections everywhere, while the SPARCStation was nice and clean with just a few integrated circuts. Sun was clearly leading at the time, much less stuff to go wrong.
Is there anyone else out there who thinks that Sun put too much emphasis on "WORA" with Java with bytecode objects (.class files) run through a JIT compiler, which tended to have generally slower startup times and larger files, as opposed to Sun offering the option of native compilation with their SDK for native executables?
Would Sun offering native compilation for Java have helped?
Not that Sun doesn't need to adjust some things but what kind of fool listens to analysts anyways?
We'd have NO technology breakthroughs if companys paid any heed to what some wall street hedger whines about.
I'd expect Sun will have some choice words for the analyst soon!
The ONLY opinions that matter are that of shareholders and customers. If they are OK with the path then a company is doing the right thing.
Sun has been in business for 20+ years and has Billions more in CASH than most businesses have in PAPER worth.
One of the reasons Sun has the customers they have is that they approach problems in a different way than any other large SYSTEMS company. I don't think the need for different approaches will change.
What other company has the GUTS to even suggest the recent pricing model Sun roled out? Once again Sun is pointing customers in a new and interesting direction.
PC/Microsoft industry puppets and rabid Linux fans just don't get the reasons customers choose Sun over others and I doubt they ever will.
And the will to die,
Stronger than all things strong,
Is stayed by a will to live
Feebler than all things feeble.
Forgive me, comrade; I tarry too long.
It is memory that holds my spirit;
A procession of distant days,
A vision of youth spent in a dream,
A face that bids my eyelids not to sleep,
A voice that lingers in my ears,
A hand that touches my hand.
Forgive me that you have waited too long.
It is over now, and all is faded:
The face, the voice, the hand and the mist that brought them hither.
The knot is untied.
The cord is cleaved.
---Khalil Gibran (From 'The Dying Man And The Vulture')
http://www.nasirudheen.blogspot/
I work in the financial services industry. Bear in mind that analysts are paid by banks, not by you. There's no reason for him to give you the 'benefit' of his wisdom whatsoever. Open-market advice is given for three reasons:
To benefit the analyst (bonuses etc.)
To benefit the bank or banking clients (see point 1)
Publicity
The good of the standard investor or the company being invested in doesn't even come into it. The fact he's made this an open letter means he needs Sun's stock to move for one reason or another.
Let me remind you that when you buy stocks, it is the banks who sell them to you. They can sell you stocks at the offered price whether they have stocks on hand or not. The SEC authorizes market makers (banks/brokerages) to sell stock short if they don't have enough shares to maintain the bid/ask. Consequently, any given bank can end up with a large amount of stocks either long or short at the end of the day. Now if they raise the bid/ask the next day when they're short, they lose money immediately. Why would you make yourself lose money? It is common sense. If too many people bought the damn stock, heck squeeze them for ten years if thats what it takes.
Now before you say banks all compete against each other, I'd like to point out that it is/was a common practice for banks to borrow cash from each other in times of difficulties (such as too many people showed up to demand cash out of the electronic accounts).
Everyone has failed to recognize that as the admin market has been flooded to the ninth with MS Certified everybody since the late 90's.
That means it is far more likely for a younger admin to recommend a MS or Linux system then it is to recommend Sun.
The last time I checked I did not see any Sun Certified traiing available at me local career or community college! (:-
They should drop Sparc and adopt some other processor (be it AMD 64, Itanium or Power4), and sell some lean, mean, powerfull and cheap server. You can't compete in price against AMD or Intel, and now it seems that you can't compete on computer power either. They can go on their Solaris route or make a Linux revolution, but Sparc is dead. I compare it to Motorola's PowerPC G4.
i personnelly will be glad to see Sun go bye bye. i was never a big fan of Java (C++ is much better) and i am not a fan of .NET but i think the main reason that sun is going out of business is cheaper unix. if you looked at it you could spend 10k on a sun web server or you can take that desktop machine that is at the end of it's lifecycle and put linux on it run apache and you've spent nothing. You also already have staff to support unix they can easily move to linux.
.NET once again proving that all MS technologies are just that for MS only.
bottom line for me anyway down with sun. hopefully 3yrs after their stock hit $0.00 java will be retired and C++ developers will be in (higher)hire demand again.
my ultimate dream is linux take over commercially making it so all those VB and C# apps need to be rewritten in PHP and C++ because MS sues Mono so their implementation needs to be retired. which will happen. if Mono is successful enough MS profits will fall and MS will stop Mono from developing a linux
If you take the time to read any of Bill Joy's recent writings you'll discover that he left Sun because he's come to the conclusion that the current path of technology use will lead to man's downfall.
Read his recent works and you'll see that leaving Sun had nothing to do with Sun per say. It has everything to do with his belief that society's current direction in technology use will destroy us all in the long term.
If he believes this so strongly, it makes little sense to work for an R&D based technology company like Sun.
This is a really good time of year to talk down company stock. Buy, buy buy!
DIE DIE DIE :)
But don't forget Microsoft. Sun is the ONLY company who stands up to Bill. Sun is the only company offering high-end Unix and not offering Windows on their servers. Sun is the only company offering viable Office alternative to businesses. And Sun is the keeper of Java - the only alternative to .NET on the enterprise server-side.
Demise of the Sun will be the great setback to all the anti-MS forces in the market including Open Source. In addition to SCO trouble, this may actually stop Open Source revolution or slow it down.
Makes me worry.
Having thought a while, I'm still astounded by Milunovich's letter. It contains all the usual Microsoft press release contents, but came from Merrill Lynch. It has name calling and the usual message "we've already won and if you don't see that you are stupid and doomed to failure". My only conclusion is that ML is a M$ whore and could care less for their investors.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
He probably shorted 100000 shares of SUNW before he wrote the article, thereby making about $300k for himself..
He gets around SEC rules by making the letter "Personal Correspondence" with the company rather than a published article. When an analyst talks about a company on the radio or TV, they're not allowed to buy or sell that stock for something like 30 days afterward. Same time period before, I think.
But, if it's a Personal Letter, I don't think that's the same thing. Any lawyers care to comment?
You'd think Sun would see a lift in sales if all the SCO FUD is successful; they have their own Un*x after all, so if you want Darl off your back, buy Solaris. But I've always had the impression that you either love or hate Sun, and people don't buy theit kit based on hard business criteria.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Why-oh-why-oh-why to people keep talking about numbers of gigahertz when talking about SPARC?
Sun hardware isn't designed around having big processor frequency numbers, it's designed about getting data through systems fast. Contrary to all the naysaying, this *does* extend down to the volume hardware - 280/480/880/1280 machines, at rates which make Wintel or Lintel systems look rather lame. Now, if you want a stack of edge webservers this doesn't really matter, but for the business logic part of the technology stack this really, really does matters.
What the loon is doing is betting both ways: if Sun fail (which they won't) then he can say he told you so. And by making such a large shopping list of things they could do, he can point to one or two and say "See, they took my advice and survived".
What I would like to understand is how Sun's accounting works: I have read commentators who say Sun's accounting process is ultra conservative, and this is precisely why they have made this billion write-down. OTOH, corporate accounting is way over my head, and I have no idea, for example, how much goodwill they have on their balance sheet from their various acquisitions.
Dunstan
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
inquiring minds want to know
While you and I know that Sun should have embraced free software long ago, ML's Milunovich recomends just the opposite. Recomending that Sun make it clear that they "aggresively support Linux" he also recomends that Sun cut it's own development efforts, " [Sun's]Solaris, Linux, Orion, Mad Hatter, N1, SPARC, x86, storage, Java-'The Network is the Computer' tent is bursting at the seams," he wrote of some of Sun's main product and services lines. You can imagine what kind of headlines MSNBC would come up with if Sun were to drop any of it's free software efforts.
The rest of the message looked like it came straight from a M$ press release. What's lower than a "corpse" in a "nitch" at the bottom of a "tech ravine"? They might as well have called the company whale shit. The personal comments directed at Scott McNealy, while typical of Microsoft name calling, have no place in profesional advice.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
They're speaking from experience, anyway.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
but this reminds me so much of how Apple was treated for a while there. A strong personality isn't popular with investors when the chips are down.
I've felt Sun was going the wrong direction YEARS ago and they were.
Sun had the chance to switch to Linux early on or just open the source to SunOs (Suns own *Nix clone) and create an alternitive but Sun desided to make money on the os market as well as the hardware market.
The reasons this was a bad idea is multifold.
Microsoft was already crushing compeating operating systems and was prepairing to go after Unix.
Linux was also making it's first threatoning moves to replace closed source Unix.
But Sun has faired quite well by what they've done. They have have even earnned Unix more years of life and probably were key in weakening Microsofts entry into the server market.
But things have changed and Sun was not standing still.
In spite of clames Sun is it's own cheaf compeditor. One of if not the most populare Linux servers are the Cobalt brand servers made by Sun Microsystems.
Yes Linux is replacing Solarus but more importantly Cobalt is replacing the sparc. Both are Sun propertys.
Standing on the old and the new I'd say Sun is being pritty smart. Holding on to any ground Sun can in the Sparc while reclaming ground lost with the Cobalt means Sun will lose costummers to PCs but those can be scooped up later as Cobalt servers improve in ways PCs can't.
Also it means that most of the users who leave Sun Sparcs for Linux will still be relying on Sun with the Cobalt servers.
Sun isn't going to alienate it's primary userbase (Unix/Solarus/Sparc) even if it's new userbase is growing (Cobalt/Linux).
Sun will experence an inital drop in income as users stop liccensing the expensive Solarus in favor of the cheaper Linux but in the long run Sun is prepaired for change. They don't look it however. Would you alert your userbase paying the big bucks than there is a cheaper alternitive (even if you sell it)?
Sun will let go of all illusions that Solarus has a future when they can't milk it anymore.
I don't actually exist.
Isn't this the guy that predicted Microsoft was inevitably doomed by 2004 or so? Because the profit margin had nowhere to go? Doomed. He seems to use that word a lot.
Sun isn't going anywhere, and if the Merrill Lynch "open letter" was an official company communication, I'll be shocked. Anyone wanna bet that the guys that wrote it will be called in on the carpet for exposing it publicly? Most public evaluations of companies aren't put into such informal language. "His act is getting old" is a bit suspect.
Sun has 5 billion in cash reserves, and a profitable high end server business that will shrink somewhat, but not completely. It's utterly foolish to write this company off at this point. I know it's a popular thing to do around here becaue of the way they play footsie with Linux, but I'm afraid you all are going to be dissapointed if you're waiting for Sun to go belly up, or be bought out anytime soon.
Oh, and Eric should stick to open source advocacy. Because his economic predictions are kind of suspect at this point....
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
You make an excellent point.
--LP
Sun research at work
Sun doesn't need to compete for Mhz, or adobt a crappy free OS, or even sell cheap x86 hardware.
They've got plent of money in the bank (== time). McNeally's just waiting out the lull untill research hits one homerun, and leaves everybody else scrambling to catch back up.
All these other projects are just keeping the programmers busy (and employed) until they change the way computer are made. Then they'll really be busy!
ML has admitted to have made a mistake and sacked those responsible for the sacking. The official line from ML is that the "values and opinions of the sackers are not in line" with the company's.
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome."
The guy is definitely right about Sun's problems --lack of focus, prorietry CPUs floundering, Java not bringing in enough cash, confusing Linux and x86 strategy -- but I'm not so sure his cures would help Sun.
Sun needs to make more money off Java, that is clear, but tools, certification, training and licencing would be the way to go, not dropping Java entirely.
Apart from that Sun should make it clearer where they're going with Linux, as their current approach is all but clear.
And they need to stop listening to Analysts, who like to seem to know more about companies than the comapnies do themselves.
Had Sun formed a strong bond and strategic alliance with AMD and focused on a hybrid, yet commodity processor technology they would be much better off today, and in position to enter the desktop market.
AMD already saw the future with the Athlon. Had a respected company like Sun jumped on that bandwagon, I have no doubt that both companies would be sitting very pretty right now.
You are absolutely correct that analysts are totally worthless. It is in fact a mathematical fact. Any advice offered by analysts/brokers/advisers/your dad/etc. is complete garbage. The market is smarter than them and anything they know is already priced in and probably has been for months. The only exception to this is if they have insider information that can only be known by very few people by definition. In which case, they should go to jail for offering financial advice based on insider information (sorry dad.) They don't want you to know the truth: picking individual is equivalent to gambling. If that's what you want to do, you would have a lot more fun taking your money to Vegas. If you want to actually invest long term, stick with index funds.
What has happened after the Internet Boom of 1995-2001 is that we do not need those high end servers. Issue with Sun is that they try to be the cutting edge with their package but people are realizing they can do with less. Until there is a need for a supper high end server which can not be put toghether using crappy Intel components Sun is doomed.
The competitor of Linux and M$ are at suns heals. Like Silicon Graphics loosing to high end PCI graphics cards. The simple answer is why do I need a 5000 person server when I now only employ 50 people?
I have no survival tips other then make your hardware cheeper with out loosing quality. Sun must now compete with Intel PCs.
Merrill is a major "supporter" of Microsoft and IBM. (they own a LOT of shares of both companies and so do their customers)I guess that analyst forgot to mention this fact.
Merrill doesn't need Linux on Sun internally because they can run it on huge IBM mainframes or on intel boxes for less critical apps.
Sun is digging their own hole with proprietary, expensive hardware..that was once very profitable for them when Internet companies were spending their easy-come IPO money. I don't think we will ever see anything like that again. I think most companies are now looking for value and use/implemantion of open standards before they invest any money into another platform.
As IT companies grow they are faced with the inveitable fact that the majority of their customers have singificant investment in outmoded IT and a vested interest in keeping that investment going. They can't abandon their customers, but they also have to deal with massive shifts in technology and - let's face it - technological fashion.
It's very, very difficult to deal with a huge and increasing legacy of support for the "old" technology and simultaneously have the resources to innovate. Most companies come to a point at which they can no longer do either effectively and the next technology "paradigm shift" (mainframe to mini; mini to PC; Unix to Linux...) makes them irrelevant.
Why should Sun be any different?
Since when are "open letters" part of a business plan? Merril Lynch is learning from SCO, I guess, that it is an invaluable tool to manipulate stock prices. How soon will it be that Merril Lynch is pushing Sun stock on it's clients after driving down the price through open letters? Or maybe a competitor has just recently purchased a large amount of Sun. Who knows what they are up to, but it probably isn't in the best interest of the public.
Sun puts all its energy into the Solaris scalability features, and ignores some pretty basic things that make the operating system have the flavor of a Victrola.
Let's just run through a few of the problems:
Sun has this attitude of "if it's not in the SVR4 codebase, then it doesn't go into the Solaris base install." This is just dumb. I realize that it is important to preserve compatibility for old shell scripts and utilities, and that Sun has taken some strides with Gnome and perl integration, but 95% of the new and interesting work in UNIX is taking place in the GPL and BSD spheres of influence, which Sun mostly ignores.
In many respects, Solaris has been at a standstill for the past 10 years.
But I'd be more impressed if I also saw analysts saying things like :
Imaginary analyst quotes follow.....
Merril Lynch analyst to SCO : Change or risk becoming SEC fodder!
Financial Times analysts tell RIAA - Adapt to technology or risk being ignored completely.
WSJ analysts tell Linux Advocates : Crunch not lest ye be crunched!
If I am reading Netcraft active sites properly.
I just can't help but think that at some point, when Sun becomes cheap enough, IBM will buy out Sun. There's just too much potential synergy. Specifically, IBM will then own all those SCO licenses that Sun currently owns. SCO themselves have said that Sun's licenses give them almost unlimited rights to use of SCO IP. Of course it's debatable what that's worth. But additionally, IBM would then own Java which they've already invested huge amounts of money. And finally, Sun and IBM are some of the few makers of "big iron" that are left. Sun is down to a $10 billion company. IBM has $6 billion lying around in cash, issue a little debt and you now have an all cash deal.
Merrill Lynch is only now saying what many employees and stock holders (I'm both, which is why I'm anonymous) have said for quite awhile now. Hopefully the Directors will clue in some day.
I greatly respect what McNealy, Joy, etc did with the company, but they are out of touch with things and I believe that Mr. McNearly is past the point of turning back. He and most of the top level execs are no longer right for Sun.
Worst.Advertising.Campaign.Ever.
I know it's hard to get along with marketeers sometimes, but they do actually have their role...
Unfortunately, believing in a specific vision was what made so many tech companies great to begin with. Change the vision, and maybe your company makes more business sense but now the customers feel you don't care anymore. I lost interest in DEC when the new management made it plain that what they believed in most strongly was money, and apparently a lot of other people did the same. (Then again, DG's very first ad. said, "we intend to make a lot of money." Go figure.)
Maybe to be a great tech company, it's necessary to openly declare that "we're gonna push this vision to the limit, then cash out and try something else." Many visions have limited lifetimes.
Sun is overpriced in almost all of their markets, and insanely overpriced in lower end markets. 13K for a sunblade 1000? Why because it has a scsi drive?
One of my clients bought a Sun v880 for roughly 100K. One of the drive crashes in the raid 5 array and took down the whole volume. Support didn't solve our problem (The guy was nice tho).
The only good thing I see they did was to buy Star Division and open source it, but the level of effort and money they are putting into it however, is negligable and they are not staying far enough above the opensource development progress. Seems to be that its a fairly wide open market to me. They let ximian slip by which was a pretty obvious buy if you are interested in uniformity between Solaris and Linux.
Bottom line, I just won't pay that kind of money for their overpriced hardware or software, any of it. I can build or buy four times the machine for 1/3rd of the price.
McNeely seems to be running Sun Micro by his ego and hate for Bill Gates. He needs to resign before he totally destroys that company. This man complaining about Microsoft saying they (MS) are "over featuring" their products suggesting that's somehow a detriment to their customers... says it all. Basically He won't invest in adding features because in his view, users don't need them anyways. That says it all. He needs to go. Needed to 6 years ago.
Patrick
There is a reason this guy (Milunovich) has earned a nickname at the Register, putting him in the same pantheon as Chipzilla, Chimpzilla, Captain Cyborg, and the World's Greatest Luddite. He's the Loon.
illegitimii non ingravare
This is a very simple situation: Sun is getting bulldozed by commodity parts. AMD is 15% of the commodity parts (processor) market. If Sun buys AMD, it will live.
This will be complex, because Sun has avoided PCs for a long time with good reason. But Sun can be a commodity parts supplier without being a commodity systems manufacturer.
Bringing together the Sparc and Opteron design teams could also breathe new ideas into both architectures.
If Sun owned AMD, Sun would have to tone down the anti-Microsoft rhetoric, which should have happened aeons ago anyway.
If Sun built Starcats or E15ks out of Opterons, Sun could theoretically scale Linux and Windows in addition to Solaris.
Sun could also introduce components into the Opteron family that would make scaling the chip difficult for competetors (by clever use of patents, etc.). Sun could cede the low end Opterons to Dell, but be the only player for the high end.
In any case, Sun needs to pick some commodity area of the market and invest heavily to survive. As Sun has a hardware focus, AMD seems to be the most reasonable choice.
We're a networking systems company and we were standardized on Sun systems until a couple of years ago. What changed? We added Linux x86 to the mix. Why? Speed gains in the 2x range for simulation, synthesis and timing analysis of our ASICs. Oh yeah, and the boxes were (back then) $2K instead of $10K for similar configurations (yeah, 32-bit vs. 64-bit, but I'm talking application performance not system capability/capacity at the moment). A few years ago we bought several 4500s with 8 CPUs/20GB memory and they are still in use today, although are eschewed by the engineers except for high-capacity jobs the x86 boxes can't handle.
And this is where Sun *still* shines. We've run benchmarks on multi-CPU x86 boxes up through the latest Xeons and we're underwhelmed to say the least. Unfortunately, the code we run is optimized for the P3 architecture and just doesn't run that well on P4. Also, the memory architecture sucks compared to Sun; a second job running on one of those Xeon systems brings the performance of the first job WAY down (not due to CPU switching; we used a special kernel that eliminated most of that). This does NOT happen on our 4-year old Sun systems. Itanium systems are insane expensive (more than an equivalent Sun system these days) and Opteron is just becoming available from tier-1 OEMs. We'll look at the Opteron as soon as we can get our paws on one, believe me.
And if you're talking large memory footprints, Sun is just about the only way to go for our applications. We just bought a new Sun system for our high-end jobs that need gigs of memory. The old 4500s are still working but they're a bit slow.
Our future is bound to include Sun for the forseeable future, but the Opteron systems may reduce how many Sun systems we buy in the future. If Sun could make a profit on such a reduced volume (high-end servers instead of desktops, mid-range and high-end servers together) it would be great. But it's hard to be in a low-volume business and maintain profits; I suspect they won't survive in their current incarnation.
My main point (you didn't know I had one, did you?) is that there are some things that Sun does *very* well and they have no real peer. Oh, you can talk about IBM or HP, but will my EDA applications run there? Nope, so it's a moot point. The installed based gives Sun the edge there, even if their system architecture could be shown to be lacking with respect to those vendors.
I hope StarOffice gives them a leg up on the desktop, be it on Sun hardware or otherwise. It's a solid product; just wish they had brought it out a couple of years ago in its present form.
- Leo
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
> I've worked for Sun in the late 70s
elite. I worked at Microsoft in the early 60's.
Sun's mistakes are well documented, but the biggest one is believing that what made them successful in the past would make them successful in the future.
Yeah, you're right. That's a crazy idea for any business.
Hahahahahaha! And when the Sun sets on Solaris down go the Java programmers!!!! I knew I would be glad I stayed away from craplets and beaners!
Yepp C# looks alot like Java, okay well it's a complete and total rip off of Java with some VB features thrown in, but it's got a sweet .NET infrastructure under it that Java doesn't have and it's made by a company that might actually be in business 5 years from now. So you coffee drinkers you'd better get .NET!!!!
--Richard
If that is the biggest mistake, then the second biggest mistake is the processor-design team. According to "Sun's processor plans slip a notch", the schedule of the UltraSPARC processors has slipped again. The processor-design team has 2 characteristics: chronically behind schedule and chronically behind the performance curve. Right now, the UltraSPARC III is being crushed, performance-wise, by the Power4+ and the SPARC64-V, according to SPEC".
Yet, McNealy stubbornly clings to the UltraSPARC III. If he knew how to run Sun, he would immediately scrap the UltraSPARC III and successors and tell his server team to use the SPARC64-V. He could come out with an E15K that just barely competes against the p690 in about 2 months. The SPARC64-V is instruction-set compatiable with the UltraSPARC III and vastly outperforms it, and modifying the E15K and other Sun servers to use the SPARC64-V is a simple matter.
Time is extremely critical. Sun itself claims that it will lose about 10 cents per share for the first quarter. 10 cents per share means a loss of about $300 million. Extrapolating to the full fiscal year means a loss of about $1.2 billion. In order to compensate for that loss, Sun will need to fire about 6000 employees.
The only conceivable reason that McNealy refuses to abandon the UltraSPARC III is that he fervently supports a workforce weighted in favor of H-1B workers. Sun has many H-1B employees, and they built the UltraSPARC III. By contrast, Fujitsu uses native workers (i.e. Japanese citizens), and they built the SPARC64-V. (IBM also prefers American citizens or permanent residents, and they built the Power4).
McNealy better put aside his ego and go with the SPARC64-V. It is the fastest, safest route to boosting Sun's fortunes. In the future, he should consider giving preference to American workers, not H-1B workers. There is no evidence to suggest that H-1B workers are better than American ones; indeed, H-1B workers might actually be destroying Sun as evidenced by the horribly designed UltraSPARC III.
Most importantly, the SPARC64-V will buy time for McNealy. Maybe 1 year or 2 years of breathing room. Then, he can make the hard decision of spinning off the processor-development group and transforming Sun into a niche player that focuses on two areas: software applications and highend-servers that use Fujitsu processors (or, gasp, IBM processors) designed by native talent. Other possibilities have been thoughtfully outlined by Merrill Lynch, the premier American investment company.
I was reviewing Sun's financials, and found that on their consolidated fiscal year-end income statement they had a $2.1 billion addition called "impairment of goodwill".
0 03-q4.html
http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/investor/financials/2
Without this addition they would have lost $4.4 billion dollars for the fiscal year instead of the $2.3 billion.
What does this mean? Based on this Forbes article on the subject, it has something to do with the difference in the market value and book value of an asset. If the market value is less than the book value then you can take the difference and apply it back as an asset?
http://www.forbes.com/2002/05/22/0522sf.html
It appears the amount is based on the revaluation of some assets or acquisition they had, but it's not explained in the notes.
From the previous the year the value was only $6 million.
I'm just curious if this financial adjustment makes the story at Sun worse than it appears.
One would think that this story is ripe for the pickings...
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
Well, they must've fixed it before I woke up, 'cause it's a beautiful Fall day in Tampa :)
But, if you're looking to drop $1.3 million on a computer, you go to Sun.
Just because Sun overcharges for their computers doesn't make them a "high-end market provider".
If I'm going to spend $1.3 million on a computer, I might just as well go with IBM. Of, depending on the application, set up a large cluster out of PC hardware, like Google and many other companies.
As far as I can tell, the only thing that has been keeping Sun above water is the fact that they used to have proven, high-end multi-processor machines, which you need if you use a large, non-distributed database. But with the increasing availability of distributed databases, very high speed networks, and people who are getting smarter about distributed systems, the importance of that is fading fast. And, of course, IBM in particular has added high-end UNIX machines to their offerings, in addition to their mainframes. In fact, much of Sun's remaining business was business that Sun had taken away over the years from IBM and that is now going back to IBM (the other big part of Sun's business was academia and research, but I don't see Sun being a dominant player there anymore).
Sun OS is about as stable as they come.
Actually, Sun is running Solaris now. And their OS has had plenty of serious bugs over the years. Furthermore, it simply isn't competitive. If it came on the market today, it would be laughed at. The only reason why people are still using it is because they have been using it for years.
Believe it: Sun is in trouble.
Even x86 procs are lightyears ahead of SPARC (not to mention the Itanium). SPARCs are good for one thing - scaling - i.e. put 32 of them in a MP system. x86 procs can't really do that yet, but I wouldn't be very surprised if, let's say, an 8xOpteron system beat the shit out of a 32xSPARC machine on an enterprise benchmark.
And btw, for the enterprise segment the frequency of a processor is almost irrelevant - the size of the caches is MUCH more important, as the memory is ~100->400 times slower than the processor. I think that's why the latest Itanium has a whooping 6MB of L3 cache, but doesn't run at the same frequency as the P4.
The Raven
If that is the case, then we should suspect that a certain common "market analyst" business pattern is in operation. When analysts loudly proclaim bad news about a profitable company with good cash reserves, the stock price plummets. A few weeks later, all is forgotten, and analysts start parisning the company as an overlooked gem, and of course the stock price rises significantly.
The astute reader will note that there is a significant opportunity when this pattern is detected in a timely manner.
We really have a bad situation with Sun. On the one hand, the money-making parts of the company are being beaten up badly by Linux, BSD, and Microsoft. On the other hand, there is a significant number of open source Java projects.
But, unfortunately, Java isn't open source. In fact, Java isn't even an open standard: you can't implement it on your own. Sun has woven an intricate web of contractual dependencies, trademarks, patents, copyrights, and certification procedures around the Java platform. If you don't believe me, actually spend some time reading the SCSL, the documentation license (both presented to you when you download code from java.com), the JCP agrements, and their patents on the USPTO web site.
Note that this situation is very different from some of Sun's other open source contributions. OpenOffice (as far as I can tell) is open source and guaranteed to remain that way because it is covered by the GPL. That's the kind of open source donations we need. But the fact that Sun got it right with OpenOffice doesn't help the fact that Sun got it wrong with Java.
While Sun's potential claims may ultimately be legally weak, they seem far more substantive to me than SCO's claims regarding Linux--Sun really can claim that "all Java implementations derive from their work". And like SCO, Sun is set up for a predictable corporate financial melt-down. It is going to be desperate management and sleazy lawyers that are going to turn off the lights at Sun, as they do at most other failing companies, and they will try to monetize the few remaining assets that Sun will have as much as possible.
As long as Sun was rich, we could perhaps trust them to keep funding Java development with their other earnings and to give the resulting binaries away, even if the platform wasn't open source. But it looks probable now that Sun is going to go downhill, and open source Java developers need guarantees now that the platform is going to remain at least free-as-in-beer and that someone else will be able to take over its maintenance.
The best way of guaranteeing that that I see is for Sun to put their Java-related patents into the public domain, remove the restrictive licenses from the Java specifications, and to open source their implementation. But the JCP doesn't guarantee any of that. If Sun doesn't do that, open source developers should now stay away from Java.
Before folks get on the Sun-is-doomed bandwagon, take a look at some of the latest offerings from Sun. While it probably does not yield the huge margins of big-iron, the lower-end systems that have recently come out are extremely price competitive. In fact, the x86 servers (the v60 and v65) came in much lower than Dell/HP and most of the white-box vendors for a recent price quote that we did. They seem to finally have their head on straight for the lower end of the market.
Now if only they would come out with an Opteron-based lower end board. The Inquirer had a good article about how Sun and IBM could use the Opteron/AMD64 platform to effectively smother Itanium cutting out both Intel and HP at the same time.
Frankly I see little in Mad Hatter that I cannot get out of any distro push GNOME. It does not appear that the product provides any real tangible benefit over Red Hat or any other major GNOMEified distro.
I am not too sure why people think that Sun should go the Opteron route. Just because the Opteron is new and sexy does not mean it is a better architecture than the SPARC. Opteron is targeted as a connection strategy for people that are on Windows platform, and need a 64 bit solution. While this will not be the case if MS doesn't support the Opteron, currently the Opteron is performing the same role for the Linux Market. 32 bit apps run on it fine, and you can get the few critical applications tweaked for 64 bit to get the full power you need.
SPARC has no such need for backward compatability. SPARC runs solaris apps, all of which are 64 bit native. They can optimize for it with out have to have a parallel instruction path for 32 bit apps. There are years of upon years of scientist time dedicated to optimizing the SPARC chip, and tuning the Solaris code to make the most of it.
Saying that Sun should abandon SPARC for Opteron hides a fundamental difference between these two processors.
Open Source Identity Management: FreeIPA.org
You could run RT-11 on the PC 350 as I remember and it was pretty spiffy.
DEC decided that what they REALLY needed to run on the 350 was a dumbed-down version of RSX-11/M-Plus with an awful menu system.
RT-11 was a wonderful little OS (little in that it's memory footprint was about 8K) whose motto was "Who says you can't love something that's small and finishes fast?"
DEC suffered a severe failure of vision -- they had the pieces but Olson wouldn't listen about how to put them together.
I don't see it. There is no reason that any poster to this site should belittle AC posts. There is an awful lot of drivel posted by dopes who wasted the time to get an ID (and more time trying to get that ridiculous karma bonus).
Solaris patches are very much based on ZIP. I may have been wrong about the Korn shell, however.
And because YHL, yoo, too, Mr. Simpleton, should be modded down.
Ta ta for now.
1. Don't listen to "The Loon" for the most part.
2. Spin off Java into a separate company that is owned by non-Microsofties. The companies should include Sun, IBM, Apple, AOL, (HP?), PalmSource, Sony and other Japanese consumer electronics companies, Nokia and other cell phone companies, etc., and Red Hat. Some might say this would be adding too many cooks to the kitchen, but it is a good strategy for keeping
3. Something must be done about SPARC. There is truth that SPARC will require lots of R&D to keep up with the IBMs, the Intels, and the AMDs of the market. Sheesh, even AMD has its own host of troubles keeping up. The only problem about divesting the chipset is Sun gives up control of its destiny. Its the same argument as Britain giving up Sterling for the Euro; a matter of trust. Britain can't exactly trust the European Central Bank because France and Germany have flouted the Stabilization Pact with their lack-of-fiscal-discipline with their budgets and if this is allowed longterm, the Euro becomes funny money. The same goes for Sun. Does Sun feel comfortable trusting Intel? Nope. Its in Intel's best interest to weaken Sun through their strong relationship with Dell. Trust IBM with Power? Only unless Sun becomes a subsidiary of IBM, or becomes a joint owner in the Microelectronics division that would come about through an asset exchange. Trust AMD? Nope. AMD is an IBM proxy since IBM is the actual manufacturer of the chips. In one word, this is bad.
4. Dump Mat Hatter? No way. This could become a profitable endeavor for companies not yet willing to buy new PCs. The analyst is wrong.
5. Get Star Office/Open Office out the door for Mac OS X, and step on it. An officially supported Star Office for OS X would be a compelling choice for a company wishing to rid itself of Microsoft while upgrading to new computers. More money, and it cuts Microsoft two ways, which is good for Sun.
Open for other ideas since not on was this post a statement, but its also a question...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
First off, Merril Lynch is basically telling Sun "Hire our consultants or you will get bought out" in this open letter. And who are they to advise anyone about how to run their business anymore after all the shenanighans they were up to in the 90's (and got caught)!
I think Sun lost its way a long time ago. McNealy et al don't seem able to decide if they're a hardware company or a software company. The idea, pre-Java, was that Solaris shifted the Sparc boxes. However, now we have tight hardware margins, cheap commodity (intel) boxes muscleing in, and nowhere left for the dot in dot com to go. There seems to be no clear strategy for Java (branding everything hardware and software as the Java Platform just isn't making sense to me), no clear strategy for Linux (talk it down one week, offer it to your customers the next), no clear strategy to deal with the the threat from commodity boxes and Linux on Intel (buy Cobalt and end of line its products). The writing was on the wall back in 1998 when Sun purchased Forte Software in a multi-million dollar deal. Anyone who knows what Forte was will realise the potential there was to avoid the inelegent mess that J2EE has turned into. Forte was a system for rapidly building distributed systems, with failover and loadbalancing working out of the box. The gem in its crown was a technology called Application Partitioning which allowed developers to write and test code on one machine and partition (distribute it) to all machines in the target environment with one mouse click. In many ways it was ahead of its time. I think Forte is called Sun Unified Server these days and it's due to be end-of-lined within the next two years. Sun are hoping that it's customers will "upgrade" (downgrade) to J2EE. They'll probably move to .NET...
Really, Sun needs a clear strategy and clear direction.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Sounds like Rubbish to me. I seriously doubt a CEO or a compaines arrogance can harm a company.
Did I mention that I work for Motorola so I know what I'm saying.
Q: What is the difference between Merill Lynch and David Lynch?
A: There is no difference. Nobody understands what they do, and they both lose a lot of money.
...a few days ago.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you're too lazy to follow the link, here's the copy.
===
The Loon rides again with attack on Sun's comic value
By Ashlee Vance in Chicago
Posted: 17/09/2003 at 22:44 GMT
A Sun Microsystems conference would not be complete without the witty musings of Merrill Lynch analyst Steve Milunovich.
Milunovich's reputation as "The Loon" precedes him. This is the man that backed research and development with unparalleled vigor during the dot-com boom only to turn his back on technology development a stock market crash later. And now Miloonovich has applied his razor sharp wit to Sun's new Java Enterprise System.
Here's his first take on the product.
"Sun's push into software could be disruptive to IBM and Microsoft's enterprise software businesses. By pricing its desktop and server suites at $50 and $100 per employee per year, up to 75 percent cheaper than competitive offerings, Sun could cause enterprises to reconsider their purchases."
This is classic Loon. The analyst has a particular knack for pointing out the obvious. He excels at it.
Miloonovich has a duty to keep things simple for his customers. We understand this. It makes sense to give the basic details of Sun's move and put them in context. His context, however, is rather underwhelming. But we are here to help.
Sun's new pricing scheme has the potential to affect a whole host of companies. IBM and Microsoft do head the list, but HP, Dell, Veritas and BEA may feel some heat as well.
Neither HP or Dell has a homegrown middleware stack. This means they are forced to turn to partners such as Microsoft and BEA for the code customers need. If Sun falls flat on its face with the Java Enterprise System, then neither HP nor Dell has a worry. If, however, the plan succeeds, then HP and Dell will both be at Microsoft, BEA or (insert ISV here)'s mercy. HP and Dell need to pray that software makers adjust their prices at speed.
Keep in mind that it took Sun about a year to figure out the pricing model for the Java Enterprise System. Sun had to look at how the price change would affect its bottom line, how to integrate the products, how to train employees to sell the package and how to explain it.
We can't stress enough that Sun must show success with the Java Enterprise System to be taken seriously. It has tried to undermine the app server makers before by bundling its product with Solaris. This did not work well. For the Java System pricing model to have major impact, Sun needs to get some wins this time. But now we sound like The Loon.
Still, the pricing model could well be considered one of those mystical inflection points whether Sun succeeds or fails. The company has pushed the vast majority of "a system's" value onto the hardware part of the purchase. At $100 per employee, the software stack is just along for the ride.
Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice president at Sun, tells us that 90 customers have already requested a quote for the Java Enterprise System. 30 of these requests came from non-Sun customers. It's in this requests alone that hardware and software makers will feel pressure from Sun.
The customers will look at Sun's model and then return this bid to Microsoft or whomever. Sun's new pricing method will require a response and with that should come some change.
Some of these finer points seem to elude Miloonovich. All he could come up with is the following:
"Sun's EVP of software, Jonathan Schwartz, introduced two of its seven new software products-Sun Java Desktop (Mad Hatter) and Sun Java Enterprise (Orion). We believe the other five systems will be for mobility, smart cards, developers, operators, and possibly cell phones."
Miloonovich uses the word "believe" here to indicate his ability as a prognosticator. The funny thing is that Sun, in fact, told the audience that the other systems would most certainly be for mobility, smart cards, developers and operators. The "possibly cell phones" bit would seem to fall under mobi
How can "success" be relevant here? The ethos of this whole realm is, basically, communism, so any story about some company "failing" (and calling it bad) by its nature is like shooting yourself in the head. Their is NO success in Linux, only those that work for free and those that take free. Success may be measured but only in the context that a theif measures his bootie using the 5-finger discount.
The obvious solution is to give the helm at Sun to an H-1b employee. If he says anything brash or contrary -- ship him home. If you think that would produce too much of a "yes man" environment in Sun the obvious next step is to just outsource the CEO job to someplace like Punjab and not bother with H-1b coolies at all.
Seastead this.
While its very noble to be defending the might of sun servers where does Sun's profit come from? SOFTWARE SOFTWARE SOFTWARE And why would some analyst grunt be on the war path? Because now you can by a sun desktop for $50 or all the software for $100 per employee. Now it doesn't take an analyst with an over inflated ego to figure out that the requirement for 'laser pointer wielding, excel bar graph wizarding, under utilized laptop carrying, buisness lunch eating, highly important figure predicting, buzzwording' analysts is much less with this buisness model. (Milunovich - here's a little tip that I picked up - if you add 2 zeros to the number it gives you the number times 100)
Best post for tonight. May I add that Sun's documentation is excellent. Both the man pages and the online docs are very precise and complete. Don't get me wrong, I am a big gnu/linux advovate, but very often I get lost with outdated howto's, incomplete man pages and the like.
The processor divisions are absolute ANCHORS around Sun's neck. The days of everyone on their own CPU are long since DEAD!!!!
Sun would do much better to make an alliance with one of the three remaining profitable CPU producers:
Intel
IBM
AMD
They need to aggressively move into more standardized computer architectures. If they need to, sell of their division to whoever they partner with. Ask specifically for a CPU that can run SPARC instructions AND x86 (or perhaps PowerPC) instructions set. Strongly consider the AMD64.
Aggressively move new business into a Solarnux (Linux/Solaris) world. Solaris is now a brand name adorning their enterprise grade Wintel PCs.
Consider merging with Silicon Graphics. Yep, SGI has effectively the same problems as Sun. They both need to aggresively move from hardware to services in order to survive. They could form a common platform and merge their loyal user bases.
Wintel chipsets should be part of Sun's business strategy. Sun has produced some massively parrallell hardware. This is applicable to the enterprise PC market.
Contribute heavily to Wine. Make sure it works really well on Sun Solarnux boxes. This makes Sun a good alternative to Windows.
Start charging for Java. Use Microsoft's licensing strategies for dotnet.
Continue using SPARC processors for top tier workstation users. Leverage partnerships to produce a SPARC/Wintel Hybrid CPU for next gen SPARC to x86 transition.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
I was thinking "Pun", of course. Really.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
The problem with CPU R&D is that it takes several years to see a return on your investment. Keep your patience a little longer.